No lesser victims than the anyone else...

I first heard the news about the collapse of Jaya Supermarket at Section 14 from someone on Twitter, of all places (I guess Twitter ain't such a waste of time after all. :P). For me, and I suppose for most people who grew up in the Klang Valley, the news didn't fail to elicit the jaw-dropping, wide-eyed reaction accompanying by the exclamation of "Whaaaaaat???".

I also remember the times when I was a kid, when I walked around this old shopping complex with my family, and years after, I still sometimes drove by the big blue building, or stopped by Digital Mall next door. So it's surreal to think that the same place you used to happily roam around in as a kid has now come down in a heap of rubble (though not all of it... I decided to be a typical 'kay-po-chee' Malaysian and visited the site myself yesterday. Only the rear section has collapsed, not the entire building).

Fortunately, the collapse didn't happen when the shopping complex was still in it's prime. It was already designated for demolition, and demolition works had already been carried out quite a bit... so not many people were injured. Unfortunately, some of the foreign workers working on the demolition process were killed (at this point, I hear it's two, but death toll is probably higher)... and this is the part that really saddens me.

With previous incidents of building collapses and lost of lives in this country, people will always make a big hue and cry about it because the lives lost were locals. And I'm wondering if for this case, whether the hue and cry will be just as big, since the lives lost are 'merely' a bunch of foreign workers.

I wonder because the general perception of foreign workers in this country in not great... and not without reason, of course. There are a lot of cases of foreign workers becoming snatch thieves or robbers, and a lot of people, have low opinion of the average foreign labourer we happen to see anywhere. I won't make excuses, I'm also one of those who are wary of foreign workers.... especially with so many emails flying around these days warning you of dangers of thefts, rape, spiders biting you in the butt (whoops, unrelated topic!).... well, you get the idea.

But of course, even though there are bad apples, another view we often fail to see is that some of these foreign workers do come here to make an honest living through hard work. They do physical work all day, with low pay, probably living under pathetic conditions and low (maybe NO) benefits... and most of them have families back home in Indonesia or wherever the heck they come from, that they work to feed. They come to Malaysia with the hope of a better pay and a better life for their families.

So in an event like this, when honest workers die in a tragedy that probably resulted due to the incompetence of an engineer telling them what to do, I hope that people don't take it any less lightly just coz' those who died were 'merely' foreign workers. They are people, like you and me, trying to make a decent living and doing the best they knew how. My heart goes out to them and I hope whoever is responsible will compensate the families of the departed REALLY well, and not sweep this under the carpet.

No lesser victims than the anyone else...